The daughter wasn't an infant? She was 3, I think. That's a toddler not an infant and she was able to voice her discontent about having to go with dad. There is a reason in my opinion and it's not because mom brainwashed her. I'd like to know why she was afraid of him. That tape was very disturbing to listen to. I couldn't even get half way through. The poor kid was in agony.
There is something seriously wrong here.
I have listened. I was appalled - at mom. It is clear that M stops sobbing and listens every time her mother lists a reason for that agony. Her mom created that.
I am very familiar with parental alienation through my work. I have seen examples of it repeatedly, unfortunately. I have seen video of exchanges and audio of phone calls where it is apparent. Let me give you an example.
In one case, I got a man temporary custody of his child after a man he never knew came to his house at 11:00 p.m. on a Thursday night with his 8 year old son, stating that he had just met a woman and began dating her and she asked him to take her son to ball game after they had gone out a couple times. He agreed. She dropped off the kid but didn't come back after the ball game. She finally showed up around 11:00 p.m. with a bag of clothes, threw them at the man's door and said: "Keep him. I don't want him anymore. You keep him."
The man was shocked and horrified. He kept calling the mother but she would not answer the phone. The child was in hysterics. Finally, the man got him to tell him where dad lived (who at that time saw the child every other weekend). They went there. Dad called me the next day and we got emergency custody.
Mom is a nut. She is very mentally ill and a drunk and she neglected and emotionally abused the boy. But the Courts were willing to give her a chance because she lied and stated she had not abandoned him and the man she dumped him with started dating her again and also lied. So we had to intensely litigate this issue for over a year.
At one point, the mom, who refused any supervised visitation, kept calling the son and the son kept getting into hysterics whenever she did. Dad did not know what was happening. I told him to place a recording device on the phone. Low and behold, she was insidiously whipping him into hysterics:
"Hi sweetheart. How are you? I need to tell you something horrible. I came home the other day and someone had broken in" "Really?" "Yes. And guess what? Every picture of you in the house, I was cut out of it!" "Really mom?" "Yes. And I hate to tell you this, but I know who did it." "Who?" "It was your dad, honey." "Mom, no it wasn't! That's not true?" "I'm sorry, son, it was him. He's trying to keep us apart forever. I found the evidence." Beginning to cry: "Mom, please don't say that, it can't be true. He wouldn't do that." "It IS true. I'm sorry." "Please mom [starting to get hysterical] please don't say that. Tell me it was someone else. Please!" "I can't son. It was your dad. He's crazy."
After several minutes of this, the child was wailing so hard he could not speak. I heard the mother then say, "Hold on [Jimmy]. She came back and you could hear a loud "click" and then she said, "I know you're upset because you want to come home. You really need to be with me, I understand. Don't cry, sweetheart. I know you miss me. I know you want to come home. I know you don't want to be there. It's okay. I'm sure you will be able to come home someday." Kid was just sobbing hysterically at that point and could not speak, respond or disagree with her.
It was apparent that the mother was trying to get the kid hysterical so she could record him and try to say that he was that way because he wanted to come "home". We could not use the tape, although we may have in an emergency, or if she had presented her partial tape, because it constituted misdemeanor wiretapping. But, we wanted to know what she was doing to him and if things got very bad in litigation, the client may have risked prosecution (which would likely not have included potential jail time), to release the tape.
Instead, the mother eventually refused to participate further in the child custody investigation that was going on and eventually lost all rights to contact the child or see him.
But the point is, it is not that hard to whip a kid into hysterics. If the boy in the case I told you about actually lived with mom and just visited dad, she'd have a ton of time to work on him. It wouldn't have been hard to scare him so totally that he would have had a livid fear of his father.
IMO, M was very upset because mommy had planted the idea in her head that daddy would keep her forever and never let her see her mom or come back, that daddy hurt mommy and would hurt her and that someone named Armand (sounds like a family member) is "mean" to her (I did not hear that he "hit" her, just was mean).
Really, it's not that hard for one parent to get a child to fear the other, non-custodial parent. To me, what the mother was doing was transparent: "I'm not holding her, really. I'm just soothing her." "Please, just put her down." "She's upset. You need to just go." Etc. etc. The mother did not sound a bit upset that her daughter was wailing. Not at all. She was happy to be recording it. I can recognize it for what it is, having seen or heard such exchanges in the past in the context of intensively investigated child custody battles.
